Studio Practice
Anybody can light one product well. The craft is lighting three hundred of them so they look like they came from the same catalogue, shot on the same day, in the same light.
Packshot work pays less per frame than the creative jobs and demands more discipline. A client sending 200 products does not want 200 interpretations. They want one repeatable setup that renders every item against the same background, at the same angle family, with the same shadow character, so their web team can drop the files into a grid and nothing jumps out. Here is how that setup is built and, more importantly, how it is locked down so frame 4 and frame 400 match.
The table itself matters less than people think. A sturdy table, a sweep of white or grey card, and a way to clamp it is enough. What matters is marking. Tape positions for the front light stands, the back or top light, the flags, and the tripod. Write the camera height and distance on a card and tape it to the tripod leg. The day a client reorders 40 products in March that have to match October's set, those marks are the difference between a half-day reshoot and a full redo.
Use one lens for the whole run, typically a 70mm to 100mm macro or short telephoto, and one focal length within it. Mixing focal lengths across a catalogue changes perspective compression and the product shapes will not match, even with identical lighting.
The standard setup is a key light through a softbox at roughly 45 degrees, a second light or a white card lifting the shadow side, and a subtle backlight or reflector separating the product from the sweep. Hardly anybody needs more than that for flat-lay and standing packshots. What they need is consistency:
Glass, chrome and jewellery refuse to obey the standard setup, and those get their own article: photographing jewellery and reflective objects covers the flag-and-stripbox approach those pieces need.
Catalogue clients notice colour drift between frames even when they cannot name it. The guard rails are boring and non-negotiable:
This is the same discipline we apply to reproduction work, where colour accuracy is the entire product rather than a nicety; photographing artwork for print reproduction goes deeper on profiling.
Shoot tethered if you possibly can. Seeing each frame at full size on a screen catches the crooked label, the fingerprint on the bottle, the stray thread, before packing the product away. Rename in camera or on ingest to the client's SKU, not to IMG_2043. A folder per day, a naming pattern agreed before the shoot, and a written shot list mean the delivery matches the client's spreadsheet rather than forcing their team to rename by eye.
Process through one preset built from the grey-card frame: white balance, exposure baseline, background clean-up where contracted, output sharpening for web at the size the client specifies. Applying edits per-frame by feel is how a catalogue starts to look like six photographers shot it.
Clients sometimes ask why per-item rates fall sharply with volume. The answer is this setup. The first item on a new catalogue carries the rig building, the lighting decisions, the colour profiling and the test frames. Items two to two hundred carry only the shooting and processing. A photographer quoting per item without volume breaks is quoting to rebuild the rig every time, and that cost lands on the client either way.
If you are comparing quotes, ask each bidder how they guarantee frame-to-frame consistency. The ones who talk about marked stands, grey cards and single-preset processing are describing the actual work. The ones who talk only about cameras are describing the shopping.
For the business side of commissioning, day rates and licensing explained sets out how usage rights are priced on top of the shoot itself.